The apparent victory of the rebels in the North African nation of Libya represents a relevant and instructive copy of the 2003 intervention the United States and Great Britain employed in Iraq to secure their oil supplies into the foreseeable future. In the Libyan scenario, the European nations, which are the significant actors on the stage of the so-called “rebels,” have been led by France, which did not participate in the American “shock-and-awe” eight years ago which overthrew Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein and ended up hanging him on television.
It will take a while for the real facts, the dirty facts, to emerge from the Libyan invasion by NATO, a group which is essentially the European nations in alliance with the United States. NATO is a military organization formed in 1949 by Western Europe and the U.S., which then found itself in a direct faceoff with the Warsaw Pact, which was the 1955 military alliance of communist Eastern European states led by the Soviet Union – Russia. The politicians of the two groups, NATO and the Warsaw Pact, were in competition for the support of Third World countries which possessed strategic raw materials/natural resources. These strategic resources were necessary for manufacturing processes in the military/industrial factories of the two groups, which were opposed in ideology throughout a so-called Cold War in the latter half of the twentieth century – NATO capitalist, the Warsaw Pact communist.
The European nations first began to fight amongst themselves on a large scale in World War I (1914-1918), which basically saw Germany fighting against Britain and France for world hegemony. It was only two decades after England and France had humiliated Germany, that the Germans rose again, under Adolf Hitler. They easily overran France in 1940, and attracted major allies in Japan and Italy, eager to share in the spoils of a projected German victory. Britain stood alone in Europe in 1940 against Germany, but was joined in 1941 by the United States and Soviet Russia, the U.S. having been attacked in December of that year by Japan, and Russia by Germany itself a few months earlier.
In the aftermath of World War II, which ended in 1945, colonized nations all over the world began to agitate for self-rule and fight for political independence. A common denominator of all these colonies was the fact that they were non-white, and all their colonial masters had been white, almost all European. The two world wars amongst the colonial masters, during which the masters sometimes desperately invited their colonized subjects to support them in various ways, opened their subjects’ eyes to the possibilities where so-called liberation for themselves was concerned, and thus the post-World War II era saw many former colonies fight for and achieve political independence. Two of these many colonies were Libya, which had been ruled by Italy, and, much later, Belize, which had been ruled by Britain.
In conventional military terms, the colonized territories could not compete with their colonial masters, so they used other tactics, such as guerrilla wars, urban agitation, and various methods of popular mobilization in order to promote and publicize their cause both nationally and internationally.
The newly independent nations of Iraq and Libya were oil-rich states which had been taken over in coups by former army officers – Saddam Hussein in Iraq in 1979 and Moammar Qaddafy in Libya in 1969. These former colonial states, arbitrarily carved territorially by metropolitan powers, do not feature populations which are homogeneous, and both possess angry tribal and religious minorities which consider themselves oppressed. In 2003, U.S. President George Bush, supported by Britain and other NATO allies, invaded Iraq on the grounds that he wanted to establish real democracy and freedom in Iraq, but most of the world now believes that what he really wanted to do was control Iraq’s oil. In 2011, French President Nicolas Sarkozy led the NATO countries, including the United States, on intervention in a small civil war in Libya by bombing the forces and installations of the government side of Moammar Qaddafy. Today, the leaders of the Libyan rebels are reporting to Sarkozy. They know from whence victory derived. Iraq and Libya now represent case studies of the third millennium colonialism we must all learn to understand. This is real.
The Western press in both the Iraq and Libyan cases focused on the undesirable aspects of the personalities of the strong-man leaders – Hussein and Qaddafy, but twentieth century post-independence history proved that you cannot rule the former colonial territories which are oil states without being tough. One tough man succeeds another. It never fails. In Belize, opponents of the Dean Barrow administration which has nationalized the foreign-owned electricity and telecommunications industries in recent months, say that he is a dictator, and they have recently spread their propaganda net to include an editorial in Jamaica’s influential Gleaner. Most people here believe that the local and regional anti-Barrow campaign is being organized and financed by forces in the employ of Lord Michael Ashcroft, a British billionaire who entered Belize’s business world in 1985, four years after our political independence, and has become arguably the most powerful figure in both Belize’s finances and its politics.
The meaning of Libya for Belize, which has substantial oil fields both within our national borders and under seas contiguous with the waters of the Central American republics of Guatemala and Honduras to the south, is that political independence does not count for much in the modern world once the rulers of the world feel they need some vital natural resource you may possess. This is a depressing thought, when you think of all those three decades of our sincere anti-colonial struggle in Belize, all the meetings and marching and singing and praying.
Yes, there were fearful Anglophile elements who felt, through it all, that we were better off holding on to Mother England. They were laughed to scorn, but what are we to say today? Guatemalan elements are deliberately provoking us inside Belizean territory, but Belize is so tiny compared to Guatemala that it is as if we have to ask permission for our soldiers to return to territory which is clearly Belizean by sovereign right. Guatemala is the Central American surrogate of the United States, which is the leader of NATO. NATO is united today all over the world, and they are dominant. The Warsaw Pact is in tatters.
For Belize, the discouraging symbolism was established years ago in sports. Next month, during our cherished and traditional celebrations, Guatemalans will come across the border and win most of our sporting events and take away our prize money.
We wish no disrespect to the Rt. Hon. George C. Price, reverently described by his admirers as the “Father of the Belizean nation.” He did fight a good fight, and achieved some historic things. In too many ways today, however, this place no longer looks like cosa nostra. The time has come for us to define this Belizean nation in the terms of modern day reality. Helplessness, beloved, is another word for colonialism.
Power to the people.